is features writer with five years of experience covering the companies that shape technology and the people who use their tools.
On December 11th, 2010, Jeffrey Epstein was fretting about what came up if you Googled him. By this time Epstein had already pleaded guilty to soliciting prostitution with a child and was a registered sex offender, and just a few days earlier he had been photographed in Central Park taking a stroll with Prince Andrew.
Epstein emailed an associate to complain. “the google page is not good,” Epstein wrote, according to documents released last week by the House Oversight Committee. He also took issue with tens of thousands of dollars of payments, which appear to have been made to “clean up” results. “I have yet to have a complete breakdown of payments. and the results , are what they are.”
Someone named Al Seckel — perhaps Epstein accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell’s sister’s late partner — responded later that evening, sharing what he was seeing. The results included Epstein’s Wikipedia page, a New York magazine article, a “jeffreyepsteinscience.com” website, a hair transplant surgeon with the same name, and a story correctly naming him as a sex offender.
“This is BEFORE the next big sweep. I UNDERSTAND your point about ‘one thing kills me,’ but the daily beast article is gone, the other ones, including the powerful Huffington Post, are about to be pushed off. And, out stuff is on top.”
Epstein and others discuss how to use technical SEO tactics to bump news articles from Google’s first page of results
Within the documents released last week, we see Epstein and his circle strategize how to bury unflattering coverage of him on Google and elevate what they want — search engine optimization to try to whitewash the reputation of a rich pedophile with powerful friends. Throughout the documents, Epstein and others discuss how to use technical SEO tactics to bump news articles from Google’s first page of results, cozy up to reporters they perceive as focused more on business than Epstein’s crimes, and how to get a crisis PR machine in motion to launder his digital presence. To those familiar with SEO, these strategies will look familiar — it’s the same playbook used by everyone from restaurants to news publishers to companies selling tennis shoes and photography services online. Everyone knows Google Search is the gateway to the internet; it’s just that this time, these same practices were deployed as cover for perhaps the world’s most infamous pedophile.
A few days after Epstein complained, Seckel followed up with good news: Only one “negative” article — from The Huffington Post — remained on the first page of results.
“The Huffington Post is extremely hard to move, because it is so powerful, has millions of links to it, and uploads massive new and original content it on a daily basis with posting from out side readers,” Seckel wrote. “We managed to push it down the page, as it used to be at the Top.” Seckel discusses SEO tactics like regularly adding new content to Epstein’s newly created philanthropic website, “[promoting] the other jeffrey epsteins,” getting non-mugshot photos toward the top of Google Images, and manipulating search queries so Google’s suggested search terms are not “toxic.”
Many of these practices — regularly publishing new content, or getting mentions in authoritative publications — these days are acknowledged by Google itself as good SEO strategy. “I would say they were generally mostly best practices,” Rand Fishkin, a longtime SEO consultant and cofounder of the digital marketing firm Moz, tells The Verge. “There was a decent level of sophistication, although it seemed to me that there could be more done there, and it is very possible that there was more being done that wasn’t discussed in emails.”
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